The Ballad of Arthur and Eames
by InkBlackFingers
Summary: Arthur and Eames have known each other for much longer than either man will admit to on record. This is their love story told in bits and pieces, starting somewhere in the middle and completely out of order, just like everything else they've ever done.
1. Part One

**Warning: mentions of suicide, mentions of character death**

Ariadne's life can be very easily divided into two parts, Before Inception (BI) and After Inception (AI).

Before Inception is the part that contains high school and college and her last name. It contains her goal of becoming an architect, now sidelined that she knows how to build cathedrals in seconds. It has her family, which she tries to call every few weeks or so, spinning lie after lie about what she's doing, and it has a boy who would have ended up being her boyfriend but who paled in comparison to her dreams. (She has easily dropped this life.)

After Inception has Dominic Cobb and Arthur and Eames and Yusuf. It's the part with needles and guns and creation, and it's the part with the semi-permanent adrenaline rush of never ever knowing what's going to happen next. It has a different kind of family but one that's just as strong as one built on blood, an odd companionship formed from killing and being killed by each other but also from creating worlds with each other and walking in each other's dreams. (This is the life that she hopes never ever stops.)

About four months AI, Ariadne starts noticing things. Little things, like how Dom can always ask Arthur where Eames is, and Arthur always knows. Things like how Eames always brings back two cups of coffee, passing one to Arthur with a brush of hands. They're just little things, but they quickly add up.

 _[It freaks her out just a little -a lot- that Arthur has the same expression on his face when he's shooting Eames out of the dream that he has whenever the other man brings him coffee.]_

She asks Dom about it, because she's still confused at the calmly explosive relationship between his point man and his forger, even after over a year of working together. She doesn't understand how they can go from killing each other easily in dreams to the fond smiles they have for each other in the quiet space between planning a job and executing it, and he tells her this.

(After, of course, laughing and correcting her possessives.

Arthur and Eames belong to nobody but each other, and that started long before either of them met the Cobbs.)

As much as Arthur always knows where Eames is- whether it's in the same room or the same city, right next to him or halfway across the world- so too does Eames.

 _[_ " _Where's Arthur?" one of them had asked the room at large, not really expecting an answer._

 _Eames replied absently, "Cairo," not looking up at their expressions of shock._

" _Where have you been?" they ask Arthur when he showed up, a day and a half late._

" _Had a little problem," he tells them. "Cairo took longer than I thought it would."]_

There are times when Arthur has refused jobs because of Eames and there are times when Arthur has refused jobs on behalf of Eames.

 _["No," he says._

" _No?" they're shocked. "Why not? It's an easy job with a big payday, and it's even in Vegas."_

" _No," Arthur repeats. "I've got plans."_

" _Plans? What plans? We're the only ones doing a job right now."_

 _He doesn't reply, just turns and walks out._

 _They're scanning the newspaper right before the job, out of habit more than actually looking for anything in particular. There's a small picture in the international news section, and they only notice it because the paisley pattern of the shirt not quite hidden by the suit in front of it catches their eye even in grayscale. The picture's too tiny and grainy for them to make out any features, but it's unmistakably Arthur and Eames.]_

 _["No," Arthur tells them._

" _What? Arthur?" they're a bit groggy and disoriented, for good reason, given that it's four in the morning and they have no clue why Arthur is calling them._

" _Eames will not take the job."_

" _What the- " they search their mind, remembering that they had decided yesterday to ask Eames for his talents as a forger. "We haven't even asked him yet!" They had been planning to ask tomorrow._

" _Eames will not take the job," Arthur repeats, and they hear the finality of his tone, the guns and knives that it promises, and they gulp._

 _Arthur hangs up. They don't call Eames.]_

Eames will do anything Arthur says.

Whether they're dreaming,

 _["Right here," he'll say, like he has so many times before, marking an x with his finger- this time, on the middle of his forehead. "Shoot me right here."_

" _Of course darling," Eames always pulls the trigger, not even questioning if they're dreaming or not, and he'll shoot himself a split second later in the exact same place._

 _If they're dreaming, he'll wake up, he knows._

 _And if they're not, that's perfectly fine too.]_

 _["Here," he'll say, putting a folder in his hands. "Become this person," he'll say._

 _Eames has been beggars and kings and girls and boys and children and adults and every shade of humanity in between._

 _Forge another identity, another personality. Slip out of your skin and into someone else's. Change your body like a chameleon._

 _Become this._

 _Arthur tells him who to be, and Eames does, shuffling through personalities like cards in a deck. It becomes easier and easier to slip back into his own skin with each new card added. It's easier to figure out what parts of his mind are Eames as he learns what parts aren't.]_

Or awake.

 _['Come here,' he'll ask, texting Eames the name of a city or a country, or once, notably, just a pair of coordinates in the middle of the Mediterranean._

 _Eames has always made it to the specified location within the week, once managing to make it from New York City to Shanghai in three days, using twelve different forms of transportation, slipping into the warehouse minutes before the rest of the team got there._

 _When they come in, he's perched on top of Arthur's desk, a cup of coffee in each hand and a bagel placed on top of one of the piles of paper on the desk. They pause before walking in, wary of the stranger in their space. Eames doesn't help his first impressions with having a knife slash of a grin on his face, more feral than anything else, looking like the most dangerous thing in the room with a leather jacket and two visible guns, one at his hip and one on his ankle. (He's not the most dangerous thing in the room- not after Arthur's entered it.)_

 _Arthur just continues without a hitch in his step, grabbing his coffee from Eames' hands even as Arthur shoves him off of his desk.]_

 _["Steal this," he had asked -just once- when they felt too old for their years and too young for their minds._

 _Eames felt like his skin was going to split apart and peel off of him like a chrysalis and Arthur felt like his bones were going to break through his skin._

 _Neither of them knew what they would find underneath. Both of them thought that they were never going to get the smell and feel of blood off of their skin, from under their fingernails, out of their dreams. It would take years before they trusted their minds when they woke up, before they were able to sleep without the help of drugs, before they had a dream that wasn't manufactured._

 _They had known each other for yearsdecadeslifetimes and daysweeksmonths, and both of them knew that what Arthur had really meant to say was "Steal me."_

 _So Eames did.]_

The reverse is equally true. Arthur will do anything for Eames.

A voicemail left from a Slovakian prison got him to ditch a job and his team in Brazil and fly for thirteen hours so that he could bail Eames out before helping him escape the city after a job gone bad.

 _["Darling, would you mind sending bail money?"_ _is what he listens to over and over on the plane ride, cursing out the other man in all of the languages he knows while mentally tallying the number of people in Europe who owe him favors._

 _The accented drawl echoes in Arthur's mind as he plans, pacing the narrow confines of the airplane. He can hear the tiredness in Eames' voice and an added accent that might have been caused by anything from a split lip to a healing rib._

 _Arthur knows that he will quite happily destroy one or two cities if he doesn't get there in time._

 _Possibly more._

 _Probably more._

 _Arthur does get there in time, and while he does not destroy the city, he does destroy a house and two warehouses._

 _People learn quickly to not kidnap either Arthur or Eames without the other. (Kidnapping them both creates its own set of problems, but that's a story for another day.) Trying to use one of them as leverage against the other is akin to signing their own death warrant.]_

"Can I have your tie, Darling?" he all but purred, leaning over Arthur's desk in the middle of the inception job, his thumb resting on the knot of Arthur's tie, the rest of Eames' hand cradling his throat. Ariadne had stared wide eyed as Arthur nodded, Eames slipping the silk strip from around his neck without saying a word, winding it around his hand before turning away. Eames walked out of the warehouse without looking back and Arthur didn't look up to watch him leave.

 _[He had never gotten it back, of course._

' _ur tie is a casualty, darling :)' is the text he receives about an hour after Eames left._

 _He doesn't reply to the message._

 _Arthur waits hours for him to return, which he did with a ripped shirt and bruised knuckles and no sign of the Armani tie that he left with.]_

There are facts that Ariadne knows for herself, that Dom doesn't have to put into words for her because she's seen their truth for herself.

Arthur is the only person who can wake Eames up without getting a weapon of some sort pointed at him.

 _[Ariadne stepped into the warehouse and stopped in her tracks to unabashedly stare._

 _Eames looked so much younger, curled up on the couch sleeping. His expression was unguarded in a way that she had only seen for moments down in a dream, right before he forged or created something._

" _Eames?" she asked softly, reaching out a hand to tap him on the shoulder._

 _She hadn't even touched him before she saw his muscles tense. A split second later, she found herself face down on the floor, one arm twisted behind her and a dagger pressed to her throat._

 _There's a short pause before Eames completely wakes up, one that feels like centuries to her. Ariadne can feel the blade brushing across her skin as she tries not to hyperventilate._

" _Sorry love," Eames said when he realized it was her, giving her a hand to help get off of the floor._

" _It's okay," she tells him, waiting until she turns away to bring her hand up to her neck. There's a small smear of blood that she wipes away._

 _They didn't speak of it again._

 _One day, she goes out to get lunch for the team, and when she gets back, she sees Arthur leaning over Eames, who was once again curled up asleep on the couch._

 _Before she can say anything, Arthur reached out, brushing his hand up Eames' back. Eames opens his eyes slowly, stretching languidly as a smile spread across his face._

' _Darling,' she can see Eames' mouth form the word as Arthur's hand reaches his hair. He leaves it there for a moment, saying something Ariadne can't hear, quiet murmurs of conversation the only thing carrying across the room._

 _Arthur's hand is still entangled in Eames' hair and Eames reaches out to run two fingers over one of Arthur's cufflinks._

 _Eames has remained completely relaxed the entire time.]_

Arthur and Eames dream together.

 _[They're in France, this time, and Ariadne's still getting used to the mental exhaustion caused by sleeping all the time but not resting. She doesn't really sleep unless she's put under now, and she spends the nights wandering the streets of Paris like she used to, a crepe in one hand and a sketchbook in the other._

 _She comes in earlier than usual one day and hears the hum of the PASIV before she sees that it's already hooked up. Two lines coil out of it, one to Arthur and one to Eames, the somnacin sedative mix moving through the plastic tubes._

 _As she watches, the timer counts down, both of them coming back to alertness simultaneously, eyes blinking open._

 _Before they even sit up or remove the needles, their eyes seek each other out, entire conversations carried in that one moment. It's so startlingly intimate that Ariadne has to look away, feeling like a voyeur._

 _She turns around and comes back five minutes later to find both of them back at their desks, the PASIV put back in its place like nothing had happened.]_

 **I'm alive! I put my writing on a hold while working through some mental health issues, and I'm finally in a place where I felt like writing and publishing again. I've literally been working on this story since June of 2015, and I've finally finished writing it. The story's complete, and I'll be posting the other two chapters in the next few weeks.**


	2. Part Two

Dom tells Ariadne the story of Arthur and Eames -as much of it as he knows anyway - in bits and pieces over the next few days.

He tells her about the Eames he met, a brilliant thief that wasn't content with stealing things, and the Arthur he knows, the suit who had decided that it was his business to know everything about everything and was succeeding at it.

Dom tells her that the first time he met Eames, the British criminal was completely drunk - _pissed_ , Eames had corrected him -and still managed to pickpocket him. He tells her that the first time he met Arthur, the suit clad man had offered a demonstration of his talents before shooting him out of the dream.

He doesn't tell her this -it's not his to tell.

The Cobbs were the first people that Arthur and Eames _chose_ to dream with.

Dom meets Eames first, in the middle of a smoke filled bar when he was completely drunk.

 _[To this day, he's not sure why he continued walking, when he saw that this person -forger- was curled over a glass at the end of the bar, fingers playing with the edge of a napkin and a strong smell of alcohol emanating from him._

 _He's glad he did.]_

Dom was actively looking for dreamers to create a team with. His first reaction is disbelief that this is the person that Professor Miles recommended. Then Eames manages to pickpocket him within five minutes, and his disbelief switches to amazement. He talks about him with Mal that night.

 _["You should have seen the guy, Mal! He managed to get my pen out of my pocket and put the olive that his martini came with inside it within five minutes of me talking to him. He proved that he could forge by completely changing how he acted. I barely recognized him at all. If he managed to change this much while awake, imagine what he could do in a dream!"]_

Mal meets Arthur first, at one of the high society parties that her father is obligated to host and that she -as his daughter and heir- is obligated to attend.

 _[He drew her eye from the moment she entered the room, not just because he was speaking to her father (or the rare occurrence that was her father smiling at him) but because it was impossible not to. He was wearing a three piece suit- dinner party attire- but he might as well have been wearing desert camouflage with a gun slung across his back for the aura of 'soldier' that emanated from him.]_

She's glad she attended this one, because Arthur notices her, recognizes her, and slips her his business card within ten minutes, and then they have some of the best conversation she's ever had. She just as terrified of him as she adores him, and she knows that he has to be the fourth man of the team. She gushes about him to Dom later.

 _["Cher, you would have loved the boy! I think he knew Papa from somewhere, he was talking to him before I did. He was tres mignon, especially in that tailored suit, and so polite too! The ladies, they swooned -and more than a few of the men too. He's the perfect pointman, cher. I was at that party with him for nearly two hours, and he knew more about the people there than anyone else, even Papa, knew."]_

Dom goes on a test run with both of them, and in hindsight, he can see the similarities.

They both introduce themselves by just one name.

 _["Arthur. Just Arthur," he says, his hand stretched out politely._

 _The man grins ferally, showing all of his teeth, "Eames."]_

Both of them look too old when dreaming.

 _[For the slightest moment before they get their bearings, both the men have crows' feet by their eyes and salt-sprinkled hair.]_

Both of them can control themselves effortlessly, both when dreaming,

 _[Almost before he sees them, wrinkles are wiped clean, and Dom's left wondering if he just dreamed up that part too.]_

And when awake.

 _[He never sees Arthur in anything less than a suit, and he had known Arthur for over a year before he saw him remove his jacket. He's always impeccably attired in a suit with his hair slicked back, a knife in an ankle holster and two guns tucked beneath his jacket._

 _Eames, on the other hand, can forge identities and personalities just as well awake as he can when asleep. He goes from Eames to Antonio to Gordon in the blink of an eye and has the papers to prove that he is who he acts like to any government that would care to ask.]_

They know how to dream uncomfortably well for their age.

 _[Dom knows that Eames was the person who is rumored to have created the art of forging, but the boy who he meets in the bar is just that- a boy._

 _Arthur is already a legend in the fledgling dreamsharing community- everyone knows Arthur, even if just as a person to be careful of._

 _No one actually admits to dreaming with them, to meeting with them, but nonetheless, they are the kind of people that are talked about in whispers behind closed doors.]_

They handle guns and weapons with distressing familiarity and they can wake themselves up with worrying ease.

 _[Dom wakes up, gasping, after Arthur shoots him out of the dream. He had stayed alive long enough to see Arthur point the gun at his own head and pull the trigger. Arthur's already sitting up across from him, taking the needle out and rolling his sleeve down. He raises an eyebrow when he sees Dom still lying down. 'It was only a dream, Dom.'_

 _Eames says the same thing to him as he wakes them up in increasingly creative ways. He watches from the door as Dom scrubs his hands in the sink, still feeling like there's blood trapped under his nails. The latest invention of his mind - having them explode from the inside out - has left a manic grin on his face even as he says, ' it was only a dream, Dom.']_

But most of all, both of them have the same feeling of frenzied intensity around them, both awake and asleep. Dom is uncomfortably aware of it from when he first meets them, and he doesn't figure out until much later that it only comes from (years _decades_ of) familiarity with dreaming.

 _[ 'You're so young,' he thinks, but doesn't say when Arthur introduces himself. 'Dreaming is going to use you up and eat you whole.' They're in a pub somewhere in London, and he's surprised that Arthur hasn't been carded yet. Arthur cocks an eyebrow at him like his thoughts had been visible in a bubble above his head. Dom smiles and offers a hand to Arthur, "Mal tells me that you're in the business of dreaming."_

 _Arthur smiles sweetly, making him look even younger than he already does, taking Dom's offered handshake. "Would you like a demonstration?"_

 _Arthur used Dom's hand to tug him closer. Dom doesn't have time to react before Arthur pulls out a gun and shoots him, angling the gun so that the bullet passes through his chest without bouncing off of his ribcage._

 _He wakes up breathless, grasping for his totem as Arthur wakes up next to him._

 _Mal moves over to him, taking out the needle and putting a band aid on, unable to keep the glee out of her expression. He can read her expression for the words that she isn't saying. 'Isn't he amazing?'_

 _Arthur's completely unruffled, rolling down his sleeve carefully. Dom revises his previous thought._

' _We're all doomed. He's going to eat us up and set the world on fire.'_

 _He forgets that he'd had the same thoughts about the forger he'd met a month before, the Englishman who calls himself Eames. ]_

(Dom had told her this back at the beginning, at the boundary of BI and AI, right after he asked her to draw a maze.

Dreaming is like a drug, except exponentially more addictive.

It's also just like any other skill you learn. The longer you do it, the better you are at it.

He doesn't tell her anything else, but then again, he doesn't need to.

Ariadne's a smart girl, she can figure out things on her own.

She can compare Eames' forges to her own attempts for herself.

She can compare Arthur's architecture to her own creations for herself.)

He does tell her this.

They are both fascinating to Dom when he meets them and paradoxes to him after they dreamed.

That he'd had the same thought about both of them as he got to know them- as he dreamed with them. 'My god, they're going to eat the rest of us alive.'

 _[The pointman in his perfectly tailored suit and devastating knowledge and the forger with his tattoos and shapeshifting. The rest of them never had a chance.]_

He tells her about the party the Cobbs threw, about two months after the test runs, and how they had invited both Arthur and Eames.

 _[Arthur gets there about half an hour early, bringing with him a bottle of wine._

 _Mal greets him at the door, thanking him and whisking the bottle away to the kitchen. She opens it and sets it on the counter to air._

 _Eames gets there about twenty minutes after the party officially starts, bringing with him a bottle of wine._

 _Dom invites him in, taking the bottle and humming appreciatively at the label. He takes it to the kitchen and pauses in confusion._

 _"Is something wrong?" His voice comes from right behind Dom, making him jump._

 _"No, nothing," he replies, "it just looks like we have two bottles of the same wine."_

 _"That's the opposite of a problem, cher," his wife walks into the kitchen, with Arthur following her._

 _He glances at Arthur when he sees Eames, and is surprised to see his eyes crinkle with a smile. Eames has the same expression on his face, one that Dom can only categorize as fondness._

 _"Eames, this is," Cobb starts._

 _"Arthur," Eames says, lifting up the other man's hand to brush a kiss upon his knuckles, "I didn't expect to meet you at the Cobb's."_

 _"Neither did I," Arthur replies, "Eames."_

 _Dom's not the only one who caught how each said the other's name; beside him, Mal's looking at them both with a smile on her face. The two of them drift along the outskirts of the party, making small talk, the weather and the news._

 _Arthur and Eames leave the second it's socially acceptable, slipping out the kitchen door a little bit after Dom opens the second bottle of wine. They don't notice it that night, but when they come down in the morning, they see a Möbius strip made from paper towels left on the breakfast table._

 _Arthur calls the Cobbs a week later, saying that there's a job in Taipei that they might like, and when they show up, neither of them are particularly surprised to see that Eames is there too.]_

It's almost a game between Arthur and Eames, pretending that each time they meet is the first.

 _[Cobb says almost because there is one job where he walks in, Arthur right behind him, only to immediately dive for cover as they start shooting, aiming for Arthur. Eames calls them while they're still on the run, hiding halfway down some claustrophobic alley, Cobb trying not to listen as he digs out his phone to call Mal (one of the many promises he had made to her before he left was to tell her everything and he's not about to break that ever, but especially while she's pregnant). He can still hear Eames's voice through Arthur's phone, yelling loud enough that even though he can't hear a word, he can understand all of it._

 _Stay safe. Come back to me. Be careful. It's the exact same things that Mal is telling him._

 _They somehow manage to get out of the country, dodging two different gangs and seven separate hitmen._

 _Dom hadn't realized that Arthur had a price on his head. He hadn't realized that he had a price on his head too, not for dream theft, but for the crime of working with Arthur._

 _After nearly a week of being on the run, they eventually arrive back at the airport in Los Angeles, weary and tired. Mal is waiting for him by the baggage claim, Phillipa tucked under her arm. Eames is waiting there too, standing a little bit away from the pair._

 _By the time he looks up from hugging Mal and his daughter, Arthur and Eames have disappeared.]_


	3. Part Three

There are secrets between Arthur and Eames that Dom doesn't know, ones that Ariadne can only make guesses at and wonder about.

When they're on the Fisher job, she thinks that they're barely cordial to each other. They have a shared history; that much is obvious even to Ariadne, who's still trying to fit dreaming into her understanding of the world. Arthur doesn't speak to Dom for a week after he gets back from Mombasa, and barely ever speaks to Eames at all unless he absolutely has to. Then, one day, Eames brings two cups of coffee with him in the morning and puts one on Arthur's desk, and Arthur drinks it without looking at it, and Ariadne has something new to fit into her worldview.

 _[He's furious at Eames for agreeing to work with Cobb, and it doesn't matter how much of a hypocrite that makes him._

 _He cut communication with everyone- with Eames- when he ran off with Cobb for a reason, and maybe in hindsight he can see what a bad decision that was, but it doesn't change the fact that Eames being here messes up all of Arthur's carefully laid plans. Arthur carefully ignores the little voice in his head that tells him that his carefully laid plans had already been rapidly unraveling, and instead tries to feel as irritated as he can at Eames._

 _Even so, each time when Eames kicks over Arthur's chair- ever so "helpfully" providing a kick out of the dream- he has to take a moment to compose himself before glaring at him so that Eames doesn't see the instinctive smile that forms on his face._

 _He sees, of course, just like he always does when it comes to Arthur.]_

Arthur and Eames have known each other for as long as anyone else has known them, and there may or may not be a bet throughout the dreamsharing community about the nature of their relationship. (There is. There's at least sixty people involved, across six continents, with a small fortune bet.) Everyone agrees that the two men have a long history, that much is evident to anyone who has been around the two for just five minutes. What they can't agree on is whether they hate each other or love each other -or both, both is always an option.

 _[Eames has an expression of glee on his face- one that she last saw on her five year old cousin's face right before he threw a water balloon at her- as he helps Yusuf with his testing of the new somnacin mixture. Ariadne's watching them, taking a short break from building cardboard mazes to catch up on the soap opera she's been living with for weeks now._

 _The forger leans back in his own chair casually, stretching ever so slightly to tap his foot on Arthur's precariously balanced chair, sending him crashing to the ground. Arthur glares at him each and every time._

 _Eames puts a fist to his mouth to stifle his giggles each and every time Arthur tips over, while Arthur stops glaring quite as hard at Eames._

 _Eames is smirking while Yusuf readies another syringe to test, and Ariadne idly thinks that Eames enjoys pulling Arthur's pigtails, and feels that the comparison fits perfectly._

 _Only afterwards does she think about why she compared Eames to a six year old trying to get the attention of someone he likes.]_

The first time that she starts to understand what's between Arthur and Eames is when she sees how Arthur reacts to Eames- or, rather, how he doesn't react. With anyone else, with Saito or Yusuf or Dom or even her, Arthur is always on alert. He almost never allows them to be behind him and he looks up every time someone enters or exits a room. He swivels in his chair so that he's able to see the exits of whatever warehouse they're in and is always within reach of at least one weapon at all times.

However, with Eames, Arthur does none of that. He doesn't look at the door when Eames walks in. He doesn't tense up when the other man walks behind him. He doesn't react to Eames' presence the same way he reacts to everyone else's, and Ariadne initially just dismissed it as Arthur being annoyed at Eames.

Eames does the same thing that Arthur does, but he's usually able to hide his slight paranoia a little bit better. He's almost constantly carrying on a conversation with at least one, usually two, of them, and keeps on turning in his chair so that he can look at them as he talks. He's always the first to greet them with a smile when they walk through the door, and never fails to say goodbye to them as they leave. He walks around as he reads from his files, pacing around the room as He picks a workspace right next to the wall and turns his desk so that he faces out into the room. It takes her a while to realize that beneath his facade of flirtiness and charm, Eames is just as paranoid as Arthur is. After she realized that, it was easy to realize that both of them, while so wary of the world, were the exact opposite with each other.

 _[Arthur doesn't react to Eames because he doesn't need to. Arthur has a list in his head titled 'safe' and Eames is at the top of that very short list. Eames is far from being safe- out of the countless times that he has gotten shot at, Arthur can count on two hands the number of times Eames wasn't around. He's lost count of the number of times that Eames has saved his life and he's saved Eames._

 _Every once in a while, he thinks about how he doesn't react to Eames and thinks about removing a tell. Distancing them both just that little bit more from the past. It's like a blatant sign that tells the rest of the world just how much he trust the other man._

 _He can't do it. He can't bring himself to act like Eames is as deserving of his suspicion as the rest of the world is._

 _Arthur never asks Eames why he does the same thing.]_

Eames tries to teach her forging, which she completely and utterly fails at. She can't so much as change into a blonde, much less slip out of her skin the way that Eames does so easily. 'It's okay, love,' he tells her from behind Marilyn Monroe. 'Forging takes practice. The best forgers are people who are either completely comfortable in their own skin or those who would do anything to be someone else.' Edith Piaf starts ringing out before she can ask the obvious question, and Arthur slaps a file into her hands as soon as she wakes up, telling her to go study the architecture of one of the churches in the city.

She forgets about it until a few jobs later, when she notices Arthur during one of the dreams. He's the only one on the team that can chat with the mark to find out the information they need, and they're all very aware of the man's aversion to young men in suits, particularly brunettes. (David's wife had run off with her personal assistant, a man who favored suits and was a decade younger than him, breaking David's heart in the process.) She brought it up to Arthur before they went under, but he just shook his head with a smile. She sees him _ripple_ -there isn't really any other word for it- as he approaches David's favorite bar. It's the same way that Eames forges, when he's trying to be subtle and gradually change his appearance instead of all at once. Arthur's still got brown hair, and he's still in a suit, and he still looks like Arthur, but it's ever so slightly… _off_. His hair lengthens gradually, and by the time he passes through the entrance of the bar, it's brushing his collar bones. His face is just so slightly different, and his body looks just a little bit softer; there's a few less angles. It's still _Arthur_ , but also, unmistakably, a female.

Ariadne can see that Arthur's definitely a good forger, light years ahead of her and Cobb, maybe even as good as Eames. _Which side of the line is he on?_ She wonders, _is Arthur comfortable being Arthur, or does he want to be someone else?_

She wakes up to see Eames by Arthur's side, a place where he can be more often found than not. "Lovely show, as always, Arthur," he says as he helps Arthur remove the needle

 _[Arthur learned forging the same way that he learned how to dream. Someone said that it was impossible, so he decided to do it._

 _Both of them started learning at the same time, starting with the small things- hiding the silver dollar scars at the crooks of both elbows was the first thing that either of them did._

 _The first time Arthur managed to change the color of his eyes was the first time that Eames kissed him. The first time that Eames forged a person was the day that both of them fired a gun in real life for the first time._

 _Arthur learned how to forge faster, but Eames learned to forge better.]_

For two men who have done a very good job at concealing every bit at information about themselves, they do have a few habits that Ariadne has noticed. Eames, on every single job they've worked together, claims the desk right next to the window (or under the light, if no windows are available), saying that he sees better in direct light. Ariadne's caught him zoning out more than once, staring at the shadows across his desk and on the floor.

Arthur glances behind him every dozen steps or so, a habit that she always thought was due to the sheer amount of people after him and the price on his head until she sees him in a dream. He takes a single, deliberate step, and then looks at the imprint he leaves behind.

Both Arthur and Eames have imagination enough to have totems beyond the poker chip and the die.

 _[Totems work, of course, but not nearly as well as everyone thinks they do: the best lies are based off of truth. They're much too easily recreated, anyways; a weighted die and a counterfeit poker chip are just physical things._

 _Physical objects are the easiest things, by far, to make in dreams._

 _They'd found that out for themselves, back when dreaming was brand new and untested, when they were the lab rats used to find out the rules of dreaming. They decided to create decoys, to make it easier for them and harder for everyone else._

 _They carry the die and the chip, for appearances, and put other things in instead._

 _Eames sometimes has two shadows or no shadow or shadows that point the wrong way._

 _Arthur sometimes leaves footprints behind him, whether he's walking on dirt or polished steel or grass or concrete._

 _They switch it up, using more than one tell at a time, combining them to remind themselves of what's real and what's not._

 _Only one thing stays constant through the years.]_

Ariadne guesses, from the slits of skin she sees in the dreams, the ones that she can glimpse for the split second Eames creates a forge, the split second that a bullet tears through Arthur's suit before he repairs it. She sees ink licking across Arthur's back and tanned skin through Eames' shirt.

 _[They have each other's tattoos when dreaming._

 _Eames has a star inked above his heart and a dog tag on his sternum and a sword on his last rib. Arthur has meandering swirls of ink across his shoulder and chest and back. Both of them have a small infinity sign on the inside of their ring fingers._

 _That is the only tattoo on them in dreams that doesn't exist on either one of them when awake.]_

Ariadne guesses, from the times that they arrive at jobs in two cars but leave in one, the times that they arrive in one car and leave in two, and the times that they arrive and leave together. There have been times when she or Dom have called Arthur at 3 in the morning and Eames is the one that answers the phone, and they've called Eames when they're all on their lunch break and they hear Arthur ordering for them in the background.

 _[They know each other's safe houses and have keys to all of them._

 _Eames has sets of papers with Arthur's pictures on them and Arthur has bank accounts with Eames' identities.]_

Ariadne guesses, from the shape of Arthur's mouth as he forms a word that is not 'Eames', from the quiet breath that Eames makes that is not 'darling' or 'Arthur.'

 _[Eames knows Arthur's last name and Arthur knows Eames' first.]_

 **I'm finally done! I've literally been working on this story since last June, and I'm so glad to be finally finished with this story. There's a lot of backstory to the boys' relationship and unexplored parts of their dynamic that I didn't address in Ballad, and I'm planning on writing at least one sequel to this- which should hopefully be done soon. I hope you guys liked the story!- Inky**


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